WAR WITCHES
~part 1~
Sky Girls
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| Produced by J.C. Staff for the Summer 2007 season |
Around fifteen years ago, at the dawn of my willing engagement with the medium of Japanese anime, I had an unforeseen encounter with a bizarre series that would fundamentally rewire my tastes forever. As the well-trodden halls and finger-smudged doors of many a Blockbuster Video were being shuttered for good, a new competitor for the digital age had emerged from the ether to establish a dynasty that has remained in the public view - Netflix. My father partook for many years in their now long defunct DVD mail-in service, shamelessly ripping the contents on our Toshiba DVR before sending them back with little regard for copyright notices and the like. As the decade turned over to the 2010s, Netflix very swiftly rode its momentum to build the digital infrastructure that has allowed them to survive the tumultuous streaming landscape of today. It was around this time when the Japanese video game giant Nintendo decided to partner with them on developing an app for the Wii system in order to get a leg up on its competitors who were shifting game consoles toward being multimedia systems with use cases beyond playing video games.
The anime selection on Netflix back in the early 2010s was a much different breed than what the service provides today. One of those shows caught my eye as a young teenager as I was still attempting to grapple with anime's more bizarre, unique qualities. Anime watchers of today may not be able to imagine it, but back then the marketing for niche shows was tailor-made for the audience it was clearly shooting for. Perhaps that's why they were confident in marketing an entire series on the concept of a female dominant cast where none of characters wear any pants. Born as the brainchild of mecha musume visionary Shimada Fumikane (commonly referred to as Humikane on the net), a multimedia franchise about women with magical abilities serving in a military unit to fight alien creatures in alternate World War II history somehow crawled over to the states. They are the 501st Joint Fighter Wing - the Strike Witches.
Mecha musume was a product of the mid '00s moe anthropomorphism boom. At a time where every known operating system and Japanese website was being provided an anime girl representation of itself, Humikane abstracted a step further into the highly popular genre of mecha. What if a Gundam was a cute girl? Or an Armored Core? How about other military hardware like tanks and planes? Humikane honed these ideas into tangible designs which quickly caught the eye of Japanese entertainment giant Konami. After producing a successful figure line based on his mecha musume creations, Konami went a step further an enlisted the help of well-known anime studio J.C. Staff to produce an OVA and television series based on the concept known as Sky Girls. Humikane provided little other than the character designs as he was too busy working out the details of his World Witches media project, particularly the Strike Witches anime with studio Gonzo.
Four years ago when I still worked for the highly disgraced news outlet Escape This Planet, I wrote a piece on SHAFT's production of Luminous Witches for an early installment of Seasonals of the Abyss. It was at this point that I considered the idea of revisiting the series properly, but it wasn't until recently that I felt compelled to commit to the idea. However, before diving back into Strike Witches proper, I figured it'd be more interesting to tackle Sky Girls first. Thanks to being a one-and-done project that never got licensed for a western release and Konami trapping the property in pachinko hell for all eternity, I knew very little about it despite Humikane's involvement. On the surface, the series can easily be construed as a prototype for Strike Witches that got thrown to the wayside after the 501st made its proper debut a year later. After finally working through its debut OVA and the 26 episode TV anime that followed, I was surprised to find out it's actually quite different!
Sky Girls is something of an inverse take on the World Witches concept that is more scientific than it is magical. In the latter half of the 21st century, creatures inexplicably created from mechanized clusters of cells known as WORMs emerge from the ocean and upset the progress of human civilization by attacking electrical grids and technological facilities. A massive war ensues that leads to a Gundam X style catastrophe where nearly half of human civilization is wiped out and weapons of mass destruction fracture the landmasses of the Earth to the point where oceans now dominate the planet. Due to the massive casualty loss endured by the world's armies, men of prime enlistment age have been practically obliterated. This leaves the old guard with no choice to rely on female enlistment to fill their ranks as they await the return of the WORM threat that has gone dormant.
The 2006 OVA is very similar to the one Strike Witches received prior to its television debut in the sense that it's simply a proof of concept episode. It forsakes any explanation or buildup and simply jumps ahead to the point where the Sky Girls crew is already formed (excluding some characters who are present in the TV anime) and fighting WORMs from the mobile naval base known as Kouryuu. Here viewers get the first taste of what the combat looks like in the show. Riding in a harness of mechanical exoskeletons known as Sonic Divers, our moe bishoujo heroines suit up in a somewhat skimpy one-piece outfit and are layered with an applied nanoskin G Gundam style (sans the latex BDSM fetishism) for protection. With kemonomimi style hair accessories and tail-like appendages that lock the user into the harness, the titular Sky Girls use the flight capabilities and weaponry of their Sonic Divers to incapacitate the WORMs and employ a cellular locking system in order to finish the job via implosion.
The girls in their Sonic Divers after a successful WORM kill
It's also marginally more risque than the television anime but this shouldn't be much of a surprise since that generally holds true for any anime release of the era. That being said, the suggestive elements of Sky Girls as a whole are quite tame in comparison to Strike Witches which goes all-out in its efforts to blend moe eroticism into the core DNA of the series regardless of the release format. While Sky Girls has a similar balancing act between silly military slice-of-life antics and dramatic battle sequences, the emotional through-line of the show remains noticeably consistent from start to finish. The poles of comedy and drama are held far closer to each other, and even the "fanservice" episodes tend to have actual plot developments in them that serve to push the narrative forward.
Sky Girls has a firm two-cour progression that divides the show into distinct acts. The first half takes place primarily on Oppama Base and introduces most of the major characters. Otoha is the fiery-yet-carefree lead who comes from a family of sword martial-artists but inherits her lost brother's dream to fly around the world. Karen is a soft-spoken mathematics genius that has trouble speaking with men that aren't her older brother. Eika is a proud air force pilot who gets humbled in a Sonic Diver training exercise and transfers in hope of standing up to her unknown rival. Leading the unit is the retired combat pilot Togo who, like most older men in the military, has been put out of commission and entrusts his own dreams to the Sonic Diver crew.
I was surprised to discover that the first half is quite a slow burn where very little combat actually takes place. Most of it is establishing characters, concepts, and training sequences that serve as the gel to bring them all together. The trio doesn't even get their Sonic Divers assigned to them fully until the end of the fifth episode! Each of the girls has their own personal mechanic. Karen and Eika get the twin sisters Haruko and Ranko while Otoha gets the slightly perverted but well-meaning Ryohei who she frequently squabbles with throughout the show. During operations, the girls are supported by the bespectacled data analyst Nanae and the communications officer Takumi. Sky Girls sports quite the ensemble cast but the early episodes put forth a sincere effort to establish their individual traits and chemistry with the other characters.
One of these mechanics is not like the others
Near the halfway point, the Sonic Divers expand to a quartet with the inclusion of the bratty blonde foreigner Elise who lost her family after the West European base of operations is obliterated by the WORMs. Her childish demeanor and short temper initially serves as friction within the established group dynamic but she quickly finds her place in the crew with two dads fighting to dote on her and the motherly protection of Nurse Yuko. Soon after Elise becomes involved in the operations of the group, the show transitions to its second half which primarily takes place on the naval destroyer Kouryuu where they set off on their mission to fully eradicate the WORM threat by locating its nest in the vast ocean.
One would expect the show to shift full gear into drama and an 'all work no play' ethic at this point, but it simply rearranges the existing elements instead. There's more combat sequences and threats at play, but there are still several slice-of-life focused episodes mixed in between plot developments. Nanae gets a romantic subplot episode in her hometown. The Sonic Diver team gets stranded on a pacific island in a classic Survivor situation. There's even a Christmas party near the end! Despite the inclusion of the Admiral and Rear Admiral who serve as the serious military personnel, little actually changes about the cast dynamic and behavior. Ultimately, even they realize that the destruction of the WORMs will require a bit of leniency toward the antics of their star heroines.
The last significant alteration to the cast comes in the form of Aisha, an emotionless girl who is intrinsically linked by DNA to the WORM threat and becomes ostracized by the crew until Otoha comes to her defense. I liked Aisha's addition to the group, though due to plot reasons she doesn't get much of a chance to become a proper fifth member. She mostly serves to enhance Otoha's connection to the overarching plot which is clearly the reason those two are pushed together. Aisha is also the secret "rival" that Eika was pursuing, but due to the demands of the narrative this is ultimately dropped and instead Eika spends the rest of the show dealing with her angst toward her father who is an Admiral and tried to stop her from entering the military.
Elise interrogating Nanae about her love life
I don't think the character subplots for the main cast were weak but I do wish the Sonic Divers themselves had a bit more to chew on besides Otoha. Karen spends the majority of the show with her only personal drama being that she keeps missing the chance to see her brother again but ultimately gets over it by the time she's been on the boat for a while. They try to establish some sort of chemistry between her and Takumi but it never realizes itself in a meaningful way. Elise, on the other hand, has murder revenge feelings toward the WORMs but is quicnly pacified after a few episodes. Once she establishes her found family relationships, Elise transitions to being a 'cute daughter' archetype when she isn't being a brat to her teammates, particularly Eika. The old mechanic Oto and the portly head chef Gen-san fight over her favor until Gen-san wins by adopting her at the end of the show. Hard to win against a dad with cooking prowess, I suppose.
Then there's characters who show up early on as if they're going to be major players just to barely have any meaningful role in the second half. One of these is Hizuki who serves as Togo's foil in the first half of the show, willing to put the Sonic Diver unit through turmoil for training purposes and almost letting Eika die during a flight mishap in the third episode. He's poised as this ambitious schemer with a Char-like demeanor but is ultimately whisked out of the story nearly for good once the girls learn the WORM threat is returning and board the Kouryuu for their mission. Another is Togo's old air force buddy Hizaki who helms the Vic Viper unit. A different faction of the military establishes the Vic Vipers as a counter to the Sonic Divers, but this doesn't manifest into anything significant other than Hizaki returning later for a single episode to flesh out Togo's backstory a little before the climactic arc of the story rears its head.
Despite my qualms, it's a well paced story and put together with enough clever twists and turns to keep it engaging. Its greatest resemblance to Strike Witches is that the comedic slice-of-life bits tend to be the parts I enjoyed the most. This is an anime where moe heroines are the prime driving force, and there is no environment more accommodating to moe energy than one brimming with whimsical antics and convenient scenarios. It's a balance where the drama and fighting serves as a threat to the status quo of cute and silly elements and not the other way around. An extreme example of this phenomenon that is well known to most is Higurashi. To overcome adversity is to return to fun and games. Isn't that how it should always be?
Aisha ponders the meaning of her Christmas orange drink
The visuals aren't mind blowing but they pull enough weight to give the action scenes some heft and the comedic bits the appropriate level of expression. I was impressed how little the Sonic Diver frames ever clashed with the visuals despite the obvious use of CG compositing to bring them to life. It's only noticeable in rare moments where the exoskeletons are moving on their own or independently from the girls themselves where it tends reverts to standard fare CG animation one would expect from a product of the late '00s. As is usual for OVA productions, the initial preview episode got the most impressive animation sequences, but I think a show like this works fine even without frequent sakuga cuts. For pure stupidity on this front, one can view the nine DVD specials that are entirely about fishing but primarily serve as an excuse to have several characters from the cast act like caricatures to the visual fidelity of what I like to refer to as "shitpost animation".
Thanks to the work of Shinkichi Mitsumune, best known for working with Japanese rock band The Pillows on the soundtrack for FLCL, Sky Girls also has quite a nice range of instrumental tunes that bring its scenes to life with vigor. There's a good mix of emotional and playful sounds to match the ebb and flow of the show's mood, and the more frequent tracks were quite memorable to me by the end. Of course, the biggest musical standout is the anime's opening theme, "Virgin's high!" by MELL. Something about it is so beautifully 2000s from the composition to the lyricism and vocal performance. It's an anime otaku cocktail of its time that I imagine only finds itself played nowadays at full volume within the walls of Akihabara's MOGRA nightclub.
My greatest compliment toward this show when all is said and done is that it is not just a beta version of Strike Witches. Despite some overlap with the concepts at play (an all female military unit, threats of alien origin, push-and-pull between comedy and military drama), Sky Girls manages to be its own thing altogether that pulls more from traditional mecha tropes ala Gundam than anything else. It's a small underlooked gem that is a bit too niche to ever get reappraised meaningfully but is worth a watch if its elements have any appeal to the viewer who has likely already seen similar anime productions. I don't know what Konami would've done with this series even if they wanted to pursue it, but isn't it a lettle sad for these girls to be trapped in the gambling den for life? Strike Witches itself may be heading in that direction as we speak with only a mobile game to prevent it from completely slipping into the physical gambling realm. What a sad fate it is to be turned into a slot machine.
Group photo in the infirmary!
Next time we'll discuss the debut OVA and first season of Strike Witches where the forays of the 501st Joint Fighter Wing all began. Until then, stay moe, friends.
They're still falling out of the sky to this very day...
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